I'm looking for advice. I'm helping a professor friend of mine out on a geology project. I want to control an rs232 instrument (laser surveyors rangefinder -- which we bought on ebay) with a palm. I need to send ascii strings (ctl-x, ctl-y, etc) to the thing and it echos back a string about 20 characters long (spherical coordinates of the object sighted (r,bearing,inclination) relative to the device), which I want to save in a file for later parsing and downloading to a linux system. We are measuring topography. I would like to use a newer palm-one handheld with pocketc as the programming language and have the device sitting in a rugged otter box, since this is an outdoor application. Here are some questions: